How do you remember food being ‘different’ when you were young?

[Geekster1963]

I remember that between October to March time we had mashed potatoes and April until September it was always boiled new potatoes we never had mash in summer or new in winter.

My Mum used to buy a big crate of oranges around December time and keep them in the porch, they were the nicest oranges ever. We never had them in the spring/ summer.

I remember the first time we had lasagne when I was about 18 we felt very exotic.

I never had anything like curry until I left home at 21 in the early 90’s.

Blackberries were picked from hedgerows when in season , I find it mindboggling to see people buying them in supermarkets.

Sweet and sour sauce was from a tin of Homepride sauce. Very exotic!

well beef monster munch are defo not the same as to when i was a kid.

Meat was awful, very tough and over cooked.

We didn't have snacks in the house the way people do now.

Two veg with everything.

Salad was limp lettuce, boiled egg, ham and pickled beetroot.

We ate fish for Sunday breakfast.

Ham had orange breadcrumbs.

We drank tea with meals.

This was late sixties to late seventies. My MIL still lives like this.

Fast food was a yearly trip to a Wimpy Restaurant.

Portions were much smaller: the type of croissant we had in the 80s was about a third the size of the type you get now.

Cottage cheese was very cheap as it is a by-product of cheese making. There were more varieties of cabbage. I can't remember when exotic fruit started popping up in the fruit aisles, but remember thinking fresh pineapple was a faff.

Instead of making one-pot meals with actual ingredients, my mum would buy packets of powder by Colman's or whoever. There'd be one for bolognese, one for beef casserole, one for coq au vin, etc.

We had a massive chest freezer and every so often do a big freezer shop to fill it with frozen mousses, mini pizzas, oven chips, arctic roll, etc.

Liver and kidneys were a regular part of the repertoire.

Every meal was served with a plate of bread and marge in the middle of the table.

Meals were washed down with a mug of tea.

Butter was only ever bought at Christmas. The rest of the time it was Stork SB or Outline if mum was on a diet.

Ditto mayonnaise - only ever at Christmas.

Potatoes with every single meal. I didn't realise you could have a meal without potatoes until I left home!!!!!

Always fish on a Friday.

Salad cream - which I remember loving and on the odd occasion I've eaten it is an adult, I've nearly wept from how vinegary it is.

Absolutely no eating between meals - as it would 'spoil your appetite'.

Semolina pudding, rice pudding, tapioca pudding all with a blob of jam in the middle (barf).

Angel Delight - was seen as something really exotic and exciting.

Ski yoghurts.

The excitement of the first strawberries of the season.

A lot of grey meat, of indeterminate origin! I could distinguish chicken, but most other things were just grey and it was best not to ask.

Going to a restaurant and a glass of juice being considered a starter!

Having to ask properly if I may leave the table at the end of the meal, even if I'd finished!!!!!

I’d forgotten about the frozen mousses I used to love the raspberry ripple ones.

I never saw pizza until I was 10.food was a lot more brightly coloured eg bright orange breadcrumbs.and my phone has gone wonky so a pols for the poor formatting

Attitudes to food were so different then. If I didn't eat what my mother had put in front of me, I wouldn't have eaten at all. Now, pickier tastes are happily catered for. I didn't eat a curry until my late teens. There seems to be so much more gin around now too.

I remember it was Beefeater or Gordons Gin.

Margo I remember ski yogurts and I loved angel delight especially the butterscotch one, though once it had been shared out we didn’t get much! We used to have mince in gravy and potatoes on Tuesday and had tapioca for pudding because my Mum cooked them at the same time. I hated tapioca or frogspawn as I called it. My Mum and sisters Loved it. We always had to ask to leave the table too.

Definitely, we didnt even have a fridge until the early 60s so ate lots of tinned cream, evap, fruit etc. Mum shopped daily for any fresh goods. Fruit and veg by season only and only oranges and bananas from overseas.

The food I eat now is much better than what I ate as a child. I was brought up on findus crispy pancakes, super noodles and pasta ‘n’ sauce. I rarely remember my orients ever cooking anything. As as an adult I grow as much of my own as I can and forage, cook from scratch most most nights... I am still partial to a fish finger every now and again though 😂

That should say parents, not orients!

The first nine years of my childhood was somewhat limited by food rationing post WW2. It's virtually the same as what I eat today as there are many things I don't eat: pasta, rice, pulses, beans, garlic, Chinese, Indian, well really any foreign food and the list goes on. So I still tend to eat eg roast dinners, chops, toad in the hole, shepherds pie, steak and kidney stews and pies, some fish, etc.

If you didn't like what was in front of you then that was it, no snacks - often a mealtime was spent picking out the vegetables from the hard bullet-like chickpeas.

Getting told off for eating fruit (to be fair, the fruit bowl got filled and was empty two seconds later)

Massive crates of satsuma's around Christmas - they used to cost a fiver and my dad would be livid because we'd eat all of them in an afternoon.

Pony carrots were considered perfectly acceptable, you could get a massive bag for not much money and keep them in the shed in winter.

Scavenged onions and potatoes from fields that had been harvested and been too small for the machines to pick up - especially good for pickled onions.

Eating our own pigs & chickens.

Enb we were only allowed one peice of fruit a day, we had it in the evening after dinner. I think it was because there were seven of us including my parents and it would cost too much. We always had to eat the apple off the tree in autumn even though they weren’t very nice.

Yes, fruit was seen as a treat. It was expensive and seasonal. None of this eating strawberries in January business that we have now.

Little jars of meat paste for sandwiches - crab, beef and onion, salmon and ham flavoured. Christ knows what was in them. Also Heinz Sandwich Spread. I can taste it now.

Yes I remember strawberry picking in summer, we used to eat as many as we picked and we had them practically every day for pudding for the few short weeks they were in season. We would be fed up of them by the end!

Boiled potatoes and vegetables. All the time. Bernard Matthews products. Findus crispy pancakes. Stew with one cube of meat per portion. Ski yoghurts, frozen mousses, arctic rolls. No pasta or any “foreign muck”. Occasionally a Vesta curry or a pot noodle. 1970s-1980s.

Spaghetti came in a tin. Vegetables were peas and carrots with the addition of runner beans in the summer.

The main difference to me is that there wasn't an opportunity to eat or snack wherever you were. The number of food outlets at train stations or in shopping centres is mind boggling now. Reminds me of when I first visited the States in the 1990s - the food everywhere was quite overwhelming. No wonder we are all so fat!